Embedded Pilot-Aided Channel Estimation for OTFS in Delay–Doppler Channels

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation was shown to provide significant error performance advantages over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in delay-Doppler channels. In order to detect OTFS modulated data, the channel impulse response needs to be known at the receiver. In this paper, we propose embedded pilot-aided channel estimation schemes for OTFS. In each OTFS frame, we arrange pilot, guard, and data symbols in the delay-Doppler plane to suitably avoid interference between pilot and data symbols at the receiver. We develop such symbol arrangements for OTFS over multipath channels with integer and fractional Doppler shifts, respectively. At the receiver, channel estimation is performed based on a threshold method and the estimated channel information is used for data detection via a message passing algorithm. Thanks to our specific embedded symbol arrangements, both channel estimation and data detection are performed within the same OTFS frame with minimum overhead. We compare through simulations the error performance of OTFS using the proposed channel estimation and OTFS with ideally known channel information and observe only a marginal performance loss. We also demonstrate that the proposed channel estimation in OTFS significantly outperforms OFDM with known channel information. Finally, we present extensions of the proposed schemes to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and multi-user uplink/downlink.